BTW, whether you agree with me in the end or not, it's nice to run into someone in the online world who will back up and at least re-evaluate a position. I shall use your example as a reminder for myself.
MM
We do tend too often to just back into a corner and hurl insults. Its only fair and polite to at least acknowledge the quality of the argument being made, even if still disagreeing with it.
OK... so I read through some big chunks of the patent. Not the whole thing, as most of it is incomprehensible and I'm even a fairly technical type. I cannot imagine how a court could gain sufficient education on the topic to make head or tail of it. But I learned a few things.
I was wrong about the status. Of course the patent in question was in fact issued. It was not merely pending. This is an important matter because it does mean that there is something that somebody thought was specifically identifiable and patentable in the claims.
I may not have been completely fair in my characterization of NTP. I'll retract my disparaging remarks and "bottom-feeder" description at least for the moment. Clearly NTP believes they had a fair claim.
What I cannot tell, and I don't think further reading of the patent will help with, is whether the alleged infringement is valid. This patent (or set of associated patents) really is a scattershot that goes in many different directions. Some of the claims are just obscenely general and could be construed to be attempting to apply to whole hosts of new technologies from any sort of packetized radio to all forms of two-way paging. I cannot imagine that some of these really general claims are actually patentable.
There's precious little specificity about the actual hardware and software, other than diagrams of the arrangement of switching and servers. They don't appear to claim the actual hardware, but rather how they're hooked up. They don't appear to offer the actual software, but just a description of what such software (once developed) would do. That's a tough claim to make. An interesting and even potentially useful idea doesn't automatically become intellectual property. I'd be more impressed with a practical and deployable design than I am with mere descriptions of what a design might do.
It runs the risk of saying "Somebody could take a motor and connect it to a transmission and arrange it all on some wheels" and somehow claim credit for inventing a car.
This gets pretty close to that. I'm also persuaded that there was a whole lot of prior art going on with regard to packetized RF traffic and switching of paging networks.
So there I sit, no smarter than I was when I started. I honestly have no idea whether any of these claims are valid, and so I'll back off the vitriol a couple of notches, but I'm not convinced either.
What RIM really nailed and the reason they've overtaken the market so well is the reason that I hope they continue to be successful: They got the interface to Exchange Server nailed. They did that better than anybody else. It isn't the RF packets that make the difference, it is that interface that gives them the advantage. Others like Good Technology (who do use a license of NTP's patent) can do the RF traffic too, but without the seamless integration with Exchange it is just another two-way pager. I don't need that. I need it to be fully integrated with Exchange.
Of course this patent doesn't touch on that layer. It's all about the more downstream components of the RF components of the network. I'm not convinced that RIM did anything wrong or intentially stole any IP. If anything, NTP is profiting now *not* so much off of their own idea, but off of RIM's better implementation of a wholly different area of the art. That part bugs me.